Home Sweet Home
by Akatsuki210
Summary: Oneshot.  The Akatsuki Leader intended to build an army capable of overturning the entire shinobi world.  But every army is made up of individuals, and these shinobi are more unusual than most.


**Disclaimer:** To my great dismay, I still don't own Naruto or any of its characters.

**Warning:** This fic contains spoilers for the manga.

**Explanatory Note:** So, in the speech he makes in Chapter 329, the AL makes it sound like Akatsuki is planning to raise an army. After reading that, I started to wonder about the logistics of it: What would the soldiers in that army be like—where would they come from, what kind of personalities would they have, what would their motivation for serving the Akatsuki be? And the idea just sort of lodged itself in my brain and refused to leave until I wrote it down. Hence this story, which is a bit unusual but hopefully still enjoyable.

* * *

**Home Sweet Home**

"_These shinobi, who lived only to fight and risked their lives for the villages, are abandoned…We'll build up our forces with those small villages and countries, and create an army of 'warbringers'."—Akatsuki Leader, Chapter 329_

They had come from all across the continent. Some were originally from one of the Five Great Shinobi Nations, others were from smaller countries, and still others hailed from nations that no longer existed. Some had left their home countries by choice. Others had been forcibly ejected from those countries. And some had seen their homes crumble about them, devastated by war or by the subtler (but no less destructive) pressures of economics. They had wandered from place to place, taking whatever work they could find.

And then, sooner or later, they had all heard the word that was being spread through the places where missing-nin and displaced shinobi gathered. They heard of a new shinobi village forming in the mountainous territory in the farthest northeastern corner of the continent. They heard of nine shinobi—all powerful and all men without a country, like themselves—who were dissatisfied with the status quo of the shinobi villages and wanted to change it. They heard of the possibility that they could stop their nomadic travels from place to place, one step ahead of the hunter-nin or a half-step ahead of poverty. They heard of the possibility that they could have a home again.

So they trickled in to the town, coming in ones and twos. They came from far and wide, with skill levels ranging from rookie genin to elite jounin. Their numbers gradually swelled, like a rising tide, until there were about 150 of them. They were divided into five battalions of roughly 30 members each. Each battalion had a commander who reported directly to one of the Nine. They were kept busy with missions—mostly spying and information-gathering, but occasionally they were called upon to assassinate someone who had learned too much about the slowly growing power of the organization known as Akatsuki.

Having come from many different places, they brought with them wildly divergent language dialects and cultural traditions. There were inevitable misunderstandings, bickering, and occasionally outright fights. But despite their differences and the friction caused by them, there was one thing that all of them had in common: they had all, at one time or another, been men and women without a home, until finally they had found one here.

* * *

The sunlight was just beginning to filter over the eastern horizon when all of the Akatsuki subordinates who were still sleeping woke to the sound of messenger birds tapping on their windows. Each bird carried a piece of paper tied to its leg, instructing the recipient to gather with the others at the foot of the cliffs against which the fledgling village was nestled. The shinobi who had stayed awake through the night—those who were on guard duty—received similar messages, and they all began wending their way through the town towards the cliffs, wondering what was so important that it required everyone to be there.

Yamaguchi Kosei was one of them. He was the keeper of the messenger birds, and Kisame had banged on his door at 4:30 in the morning, instructing him to send messages to all the shinobi currently in residence within the village. Tiredly, he had stumbled out of bed and upstairs to the huge room where all the pigeons rested in their cages, heads tucked under their wings. Over and over, he'd written the same words on an unending series of scrolls: "Meet at the entrance to the cliffside at 6am. URGENT." One by one, he had carried the birds to the window and watched them take wing in the early morning light. He had long since stopped wearing his Waterfall hitai-ate, but he still carried the flail that his sensei had given him when he became a chuunin. It was the weapon he had used to kill a traitor to the village, a man who had sold Waterfall's secrets to the Grass village. Unfortunately, the traitor's uncle had been a powerful feudal lord, and he had framed Kosei for the betrayal, claiming that his nephew had bravely confronted Kosei and been murdered by him. Kosei had been forced to flee his home, and had eventually found his way to the village by the cliffs.

"Ah, bloody hell, what can possibly be so damned important?" groaned Hashimoto Kayuuko as he heard the bird tapping insistently at the glass of his bedroom window. He opened the window, and untied the small scroll from the pigeon's leg. " 'Meet at the entrance to the cliffside at 6am. URGENT.' Well, it had better damn well be urgent, to make me get up at the crack of dawn when I don't have a mission scheduled." Kayuuko had spiky orange-red hair and a scruffy beard in which he took an inordinate amount of pride. Unlike most shinobi, who were lithe and slim, he was a muscular, barrel-chested man. He originally hailed from the Earth Country, and before coming to the village by the cliffs he had been one of the Rock Village's most trusted jounin. He had been thrown out of the village for refusing to send his genin team on a suicide mission. Now, grumbling under his breath, he pulled on pants and a shirt, and trudged down the stairs, clutching the message in his hand.

For the fifth time since leaving her room, Kataoka Akisane was stopped by one of her subordinates who wanted to ask what was going on. Since she was the commander of the fourth battalion, all the members of that squad assumed that she knew something they didn't. Unfortunately, in this case, they were wrong. Akisane had been here longer than most of the other shinobi who populated the village. She had been born into a clan with an advanced bloodline, and when she was four years old, the rest of the village had taken up arms against her family because they feared the bloodline's power. She would have been killed along with the rest of her clan if one of the Akatsuki, who was in the area at the time, had not recognized the potential of her bloodline limit and rescued her. "I'm sorry, but I don't know any more about what's going on than you do. I just got the same message as everyone else." Her brow furrowed in worry—it wasn't normal for everyone in the village to be called together like this. _Something very important must have happened. The only question is whether it's something good or something bad._

Yoshioka Itoh joined the crowd that was moving through the streets towards the cliffside that lay just outside the village. As she walked, she passed shopkeepers opening up their stores for the day, weaved easily around people who were passing from one place to another, and dodged the shopkeepers' children who ran through the streets playing tag or catch. She smiled, warmth filling her heart at being part of a community again. When she came here, the village had been a tiny hamlet with only a few shinobi and even fewer civilians. But the shinobi had arrived, and the civilians had followed, because a shinobi village couldn't function without merchants to provide food, clothing, and other necessities. Itoh couldn't help but feel a pang of loss as she remembered her home village, which no longer existed. It had been small, founded only a few years before she was born. Most of the original inhabitants of the Hidden Village of the Marsh had come from the Rain Village, and they had worked hard to make their new home succeed. Unfortunately, the Rain had not taken kindly to their existence, and had taken any opportunity to destabilize them. By the time Itoh was 15, the Marsh Village was struggling, and when she was 17 the Rain finally destroyed them for good. Her entire family and most of her friends had perished in that last attack. She was willing to do anything necessary to make sure that the same thing didn't happen here.

Morisaki Ishida was the first to arrive at the base of the cliff, which soared above them for hundreds of feet. The door into the hidden base was cloaked with genjutsu, but he knew it was there. When the Nine had first found this place, they had tunneled into the cliffside itself, hiding their headquarters within. As the village that their subordinates built grew, it surrounded that point on the cliff face, so that the many houses, shops, and training facilities were arranged in a semicircle around it. Ishida much preferred the village by the cliffs to the place where he had been born. In the Hidden Village of Grass, politics was everything. A shinobi's advancement was determined as much by who his friends—and enemies—were as by his skill. There was no hope of promotion if you didn't cultivate relationships with the right people and shun those who had fallen out of favor with the village leaders. Ishida had quickly grown fed up with that system, particularly when it kept him a chuunin despite the fact that his skills were at the level of an ANBU captain. Here, things were different. Your rank was determined by your strength alone—nothing else mattered. It had only taken a few missions for his original battalion captain, Akisane, to realize that his skills far outstripped his official rank. When the commander of the seventh battalion was killed in battle, she recommended him as the man's replacement, and the Nine had agreed. Now, Ishida proudly wore the tattoo on his right bicep that marked him as a battalion commander: a small sunburst. With the members of his platoon surrounding him, he waited to find out what news was so momentous that they had all been gathered together to hear it.

* * *

An opening into the cliffside suddenly appeared, and a figure stepped out. It was a sunny day, but the light didn't seem to hit him, leaving his face concealed in shadow. He wore the red-and-black cloak of the Akatsuki, and he radiated an aura of power so intense that everyone in the crowd caught their breath.

"We have just received word from Itachi-san and Kisame-san that they have captured the final jinchuuriki." The Leader made no attempt to raise his voice, but there was a tone or cadence in his quiet speech that made everyone fall silent and listen. "They are bringing him here for the extraction. Without Hidan-san and Kakuzu-san, the extraction is anticipated to require approximately five days. In that time, we can expect that the Leaf, and perhaps their allies the Sand, will send a force to retrieve the jinchuuriki." He glanced around at the assembled shinobi, and each one stood up a little bit straighter as his eyes rested on them. "Once the extraction is complete, all the bijuu will be under our power, and from that point on we don't need to fear anyone. But during the five days beforehand, we must prevent the Leaf and Sand ninjas from interfering with the extraction. _That_ is your job."

There was a brief silence, and then everyone in the group started talking at once. It seemed as though they had been preparing for this moment for years, and now that it was finally _here_, no one could quite believe it. They all knew of the Akatsuki's general plan: to capture the nine bijuu and use their power to conquer the world. Most of the people in the village by the cliffs had no great love for the current order of society, since they had all been failed by it in one way or another. Therefore, they had no qualms about helping the Akatsuki to achieve their goal. Now, that grand goal would succeed or fail based on what happened in the next week. If they could keep the Leaf and Sand shinobi at bay for five days, the Akatsuki would be unstoppable—and the world would never be the same. If they couldn't, they would probably all die.

There are two ways to react to the realization that the stakes are so high: you can hide from the knowledge, withdraw from it and give up. Or you can vow to do everything you can to insure success, no matter what the cost. Being shinobi, all those present chose the second option. The five battalion commanders found each other and immediately began discussing options for how best to defend the village. Everyone else milled around, trying to make sense of what they'd just heard.

Ishida and Akisane were deep in conversation, rapidly bouncing ideas off each other. "We'll want to keep them outside the walls, if at all possible. Fighting them inside the village itself should be a last resort."

"I agree. We could use genjutsu to help with that—hide the location of the main gate and make them think it's somewhere else."

Itoh broke in at that moment. "We might also think about using genjutsu to make them think that the part of the wall where we have the heaviest concentration of troops is actually the weakest."

"You mean, lead them into a trap?"

"Exactly."

Kayuuko pushed past a few people and arrived at the spot where the battalion captains had congregated. "We'll want to divide up our medical specialists among the groups of soldiers, so that they can heal anyone who gets injured."

"And we should make contingency plans, just in case a few of their people do make it past the wall and into the village," Kosei pointed out.

* * *

They had come from all across the continent. Once upon a time, they had been without a home, without friends or comrades, without a purpose. But in a far-off corner of the world, in a village by a cliff, they had found all those things. In many ways, they were very different from each other. They were men and women. Genin, chuunin, ANBU, and jounin. Medical specialists, ninjutsu experts, taijutsu users, and genjutsu masters. Natives of Grass, Leaf, Mist, Rock, Sand, and a half-dozen smaller villages. Yet, despite all these disparities, they were bound together by a shared loyalty to the Akatsuki. This was the place that 150 exiles had finally found to call home.

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**A/N: **For those of you who are waiting for the last chapter of "Hatake Kakashi and the Cup of Tears", I promise I haven't forgotten about it! I just went through a period of writer's block, followed by a period of school kicking my ass. But I'm almost finished with writing the last chapter, and I think it will be a good one!

A flail (mentioned here as Kosei's weapon) is a European weapon that consists of a spiked metal ball on a chain attached to a handle (such that you can swing it around and whack your opponent with the spiked ball). I don't know if there's an Asian equivalent, but I was tired of describing characters as using the same weapons (katana, wakizashi, kunai and shuriken) all the time. Besides, I figure if one of the canon characters can wield a scythe, Kosei can have a flail.

If you've read "Musings of an Akatsuki Wannabe," the name of one of the Akatsuki minions in this story might be familiar. The Kataoka Akisane described here is supposed to be the same character as Tobi's friend from "Musings," except that she doesn't become a full member in this story like she did in "Musings."

Reviews would be most welcome!


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